March
2001
Unleashing
the Backlash Battle
By Margaret Betz Hull
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Once more, I am cornered into listening to another horror
story about the inherent risks of a vegetarian lifestyle. This time
it is about a 92 year-old man who developed anemia, allegedly caused
by his vegetarian diet. As always, the message is clear: as a vegetarian,
this could be you. Feeling like a broken record, I begin my usual prepared
monologue on why vegetarianism poses no substantiated health risks
and
how, in fact, it is quite beneficial to one’s health. But old vegetarian
men are not the only “cases” I am expected to respond to.
Over the years, people have thrown at me everything from pregnant vegetarian
women hemorrhaging to Hitler’s reported vegetarianism. Sometimes
the anti-vegetarian message is delivered with fretful concern, other
times with open hostility. Karen Heller of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote
recently, “Orthodox vegetarians are not interested in food,
only the denial of much of it. They are not interested in pleasure,
theirs or ours.” Heller quotes chef Anthony Bourdain, who complained
that vegetarians are “the enemy of everything good and decent
in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment
of food.”
The vegetarian/animal rights movement has made many advances in the
last few years, including an increase in the number of vegetarians
and
raising public awareness about the importance of humane laws that effect
animals. However, it still clearly faces resistance—some clearly
malicious—by mainstream culture, despite study after study that
shows a grain and fruit/vegetable based diet to be superior in its
ability
to ward off all sorts of illnesses, ranging from cancer to diabetes
to heart disease. Over 25 years ago, Peter Singer wrote in Animal
Liberation, “…people contemplating vegetarianism are most
likely to worry about whether they will be adequately nourished. These
worries are entirely groundless…Nutritional experts no longer
dispute about whether animal flesh is essential; they now agree that
it is not.
If ordinary people still have some misgivings about doing without it,
these misgivings are based on ignorance.”
In Diet for a New America, John Robbins cites one study that
shows populations with the highest animal flesh consumption (e.g. Eskimos)
also have the lowest life expectancies. The opposite was also found
to be true: people subsisting on little or no animal flesh (e.g. Yucatan
Indians) have some of the highest life expectancies. Yet, despite ample
evidence that the typical American meat-based diet contributes to our
high cancer, stroke, heart disease and obesity rates, the status quo
persists, ironically equating the adoption of a vegetarian diet with
being careless with one’s health. Sometimes resistance is a conscientious
decision people arrive at as a response to an indefensible position,
but sometimes resistance arises as a desperate attempt to protect deeply
entrenched social injustices, a phenomenon that has come to be known
as the backlash.
Backlash
In Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against
Women (1992), she examines how the advances achieved by the women’s
movement were met with a ferocious backlash by politics, religion, and
the media. She argues that the 1980s embodied the message that, despite
all their advancements, “Women are unhappy precisely because they
are free.” Despite the potency of the feminist backlash agenda,
Faludi urges women to refuse to relinquish the fight for their rights,
recommending that women become more aware of their sheer numbers and
take “advantage of the power they already have,” to quote
Kate Rand Hoyd.
Feminism is not the only social justice movement to experience backlashes.
The “tyranny of the majority,” as John Stuart Mill called
it, can work to silence and discredit any marginalized advocacy group
that challenges status quo privilege. The animal rights/vegetarian
movement
is no exception. Just like the feminist cause, the animal rights cause
is frequently the recipient of backlash fear and propaganda. Its call
for better health and a better relationship with the nonhuman animals
of the earth also challenges long-standing sedentary habits of abuse.
Thus, the connection between these two is not coincidental. Indeed,
many argue that a glance at our history reveals that neither women
nor
nonhuman animals have typically experienced fundamental respect within
our society.
Carol J. Adams makes this argument in The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990).
She claims that, historically, the oppressive treatment of women is
intimately linked to the oppressive treatment of nonhuman animals.
Adams argues that there exists a subtle association between masculinity
and the consumption of meat in our culture that perpetuates both patriarchy
and the abuse of animals. A vegetarianism that recognizes the connection
between feminism and animal rights therefore poses a threat to the
continuation
of both forms of oppression since “to talk about eliminating meat
is to talk about displacing one aspect of male control.” Feminist
vegetarianism becomes an act of defiance in a culture that values and
respects neither women nor nonhuman animals.
Another version of this argument comes from the sect within environmentalism
known as ecofeminism. Karen Warren argues that a “logic of domination”
exists that permeates our culture and becomes the basis for practices
and values that “establish inferiority and justify subordination.”
This results in “twin and interconnected dominations of women and
nature.” In contrast, Warren explains that an ecofeminist perspective
“about both women and nature involves [a] shift in the attitude
from ‘arrogant perception’ to ‘loving perception’.”
This “loving perception,” according to Warren, “presupposes
and maintains difference” as that which deserves celebration and
respect.
The benefit of views like Adams’ and Warren’s is that social
justice movements that are the recipients of backlash need not suffer
in isolation with no recourse. Realizing the similar status of treatment
at the hands of mainstream culture means that feminist and animal rights
movements might join together in an effort to ensure both issues are
heard. Such a coalition becomes that much more important when one considers
that, currently, both movements tend to overlook the other’s cause.
As words of advice to the animal rights advocate, Peter Singer once
wrote, “Of course, it is possible that you will encounter people
who consider you a crank. If this happens, remember that you are in
good company. All the best reformers…were first derided as cranks
by those who had an interest in the abuses they were opposing.”
The future lies, then, in recognizing who represents “good company” in
the fight to eliminate abuse and degradation from the face of the earth.
Margaret Betz Hull is finishing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Temple
University. She is a proponent of the belief that philosophy is a valuable
tool in enacting social change.
